It is extremely depressing to drop the chain at a critical time. I believe many of my friends have encountered such a situation. When the flashlight in the family used a flashlight until the real use, it often has no electricity. The invention of Tim Cho, a South Korean 3D printing enthusiast, may make this frustrating scene never happen again: he designed a 3D printed flashlight that can be lit with a sigh of relief.
In fact, his original idea was to create a wind-powered LED flashlight to participate in the "Catch The Wind" design challenge held by MakerBot in June. The theme of this competition is to use 3D printers to find the power to control the wind. But Tim Cho found that there were already too many wind-powered flashlights in the entries. As a result, Cho changed a little, and the wind power flashlight that had been designed was changed into a power flashlight with “mouth force (with mouth blowing)â€, which attracted more people’s interest.
Therefore, the most distinctive part of Cho's design is the part that blows with his mouth, which is like a big whistle. He designed this unique flashlight with Autodesk Inventor software, which includes 15 different 3D printable parts. Each part takes about 30 minutes of 3D printing time, and Cho's print setting is 0.2 mm height and 25% fill rate. It took a total of seven and a half hours to complete the 3D printing of all the parts. However, you also need to add some electronic components when assembling, including: coils, magnets, a bridge rectifier, an LED, some wires, and so on.
As for how this battery-free flashlight works, Tim Cho explains:
“When you blow into the air through the blow port, the vertical shaft windmill inside will drive the magnet of the generator to rotate, because the shaft of the windmill and the generator are directly connected. Then, the coil of the generator will generate AC (alternating current). The bridge rectifier converts the AC input to a DC output. In my experience, blowing a breath produces a DC voltage of about 0.5 to 1 volt. But lighting an LED requires about 3 volts of DC voltage. I used a Joule thief circuit."
Tim Cho, who is still unemployed, said he is still exploring what the 3D printer can do, what not to do, and a lot of attempts. For this blown flashlight, he joked that its biggest drawback is that after a while, you will be dizzy because of lack of oxygen.
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